A Growing Voice for Fla. Farm Workers

His father can neither read nor write. His younger brothers still work in the fields as he once did, reaching deep into long rows of tomato plants for hours on end, fishing out Roma, plum and cherry tomatoes to be packed and sold in New York, Boston and other points north.

Lucas Benitez himself was educated only through grade school in his native Mexico. He possesses a pair of silver-tipped front teeth--that distinctive signature of rural Latin American dentistry--along with mocha skin, jet black hair and a flair for the spoken word.

Benitez is also, at 24, one of the most visible farm worker leaders in the United States. Along with a handful of young and resolute activists, he’s organized a campaign that has brought the plight of tomato pickers in southwest Florida back into the light of public scrutiny.

“Everything that happens here, happens in silence,” Benitez said. Farm workers in the mostly transient community on the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp earn essentially the same pay--about 40 cents per bucket picked--that they earned 20 years ago. “We want to break that silence.”

This month, Benitez and other members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers completed a 200-mile march across Florida, the latest act in a four-year campaign that has also seen them stage work stoppages and a hunger strike that led to the intervention of former President Carter. Benitez has met with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, he’s mingled backstage with Bruce Springsteen and been honored by the Roman Catholic Church and Rolling Stone magazine.

Their prime goal, along with a pay hike, has been to begin a dialogue with their employers. But except for some vague signals, they have been rebuffed.

The men and women Benitez stands for are near the bottom rung of the American work force: immigrants who hail from some of the more isolated corners of their own countries, places like Huehuetenango, Guatemala, and Oaxaca, Mexico. A 1998 survey by the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council found that the average annual income for Immokalee farm workers was $6,574.

‘Leader’ Role Humbly Discounted

Reared in a culture that considers humility one of the higher virtues, Benitez doesn’t think of himself as the movement’s “leader.” And in a certain sense, he isn’t: At least half a dozen other farm workers have stepped forward at various stages. Some are former Haitian “animators” (small-town activists); others are veterans of Guatemalan cooperative farms.

All have emerged from the community of ramshackle trailers that is home to most of the work force here, sunburned men and women who came to Florida in search of a livelihood, but found a political struggle instead. They call the Florida growers rancheros and attack them with the same rhetoric peasants use against their hacienda landlords back home. The coalition claims about a third of the 3,000 pickers here as members.

“The rancheros don’t give us water, they want us to work until we drop and they don’t even let us raise our voice to complain,” said Romeo Ramirez, a very slight 19-year-old from Guatemala. “How can this be happening now, in a new millennium?”

The campaign has become a public relations disaster for South Florida’s small circle of tomato growers, half a dozen privately held companies that own thousands of acres. Cast as villains by both the farm workers and much of the local media, individual growers now routinely decline interviews.

“To them, this is a broken record,” said Ray Gilmer, spokesman for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Assn. in Orlando. “They’ve been through this with the coalition for three years and they don’t see the point in talking now.”

Gilmer said the association does not want to give the organization a credibility it doesn’t deserve. “I’ve never met Mr. Benitez,” Gilmer said. “I don’t doubt that he is a leader who probably inspires a lot of people. It’s a shame that Mr. Benitez is focusing so much time on this adversarial effort on wages.” Gilmer said the growers association is willing to work with the coalition on housing and other issues.

But Benitez counters that wages are the most pressing issues facing workers here. “The growers have been kings and they don’t want to lose their crown,” he said. “They know that with the salary they give us, they will always have us under their foot.”

Benitez has become the public face of the coalition in part by default: Some of the movement’s early leaders--older men with children to support--have left for better paying jobs in Tampa or the carpet factories of Georgia. Tenaciously modest, he only reluctantly discusses his own contribution to the movement.

“He’s not in this for the drama and flair,” said the Rev. Charles S. McKenzie, a Sarasota minister and director of the Florida Rainbow Coalition. “He’s in it because his heart and soul are in it.”

As a public speaker, Benitez is not especially forceful or slick. His charisma lies, in large measure, simply in who he is and what he represents. “He is a symbolic source of strength to the larger [farm worker] community,” McKenzie said.

‘These Are the Forgotten People’

It was in Immokalee that Edward R. Murrow filmed “Harvest of Shame,” the groundbreaking 1960 television documentary. “These are the forgotten people,” Murrow intoned, “the underprotected, the undereducated, the underclothed, the underfed.”

Benitez arrived here with his parents three decades later. Natives of the Mexican state of Guerrero, they followed various crops around the southeastern United States before settling in Immokalee, where tomatoes are harvested nine months a year.

They discovered a community cut out of the Everglades, where a tangle of trees and vines forms a menacing green wall at the edge of town. Work begins before dawn when fleets of buses arrive to pick up groups of workers, shuttling them out to fields where tomato plants grow in sandy, ash-colored soil. They return in the late afternoon, their shirts and pants painted a dirty green.

Seven years ago there was little to distinguish Benitez from the others. He was a reedy 17-year-old, eager to prove himself as a man and make a little money too. His political awakening, he said, began the moment he nearly got in a fight with a crew leader. The man had ordered Benitez to return to a corner of the field that had already been picked. Benitez refused.

“He wanted to hit me,” Benitez recalled. “He was a big guy and I was small and skinny. I said, ‘Hit me and see how it goes for you.’ After that confrontation he didn’t do or say anything to me. I saw later that only the people who didn’t stand up to him got abused.”

Helped Organize ’95 Work Stoppage

Soon afterward, Benitez joined the coalition, which had begun meeting a few years earlier at a local church. He helped organize the coalition’s first work stoppage in 1995.

One grower had tried to lower the rate it paid the workers. Benitez can be seen in video footage of that strike, speaking into a bullhorn.

“Don’t we have any pride?” Benitez asked a group of strikers.

“Si!” they shouted back.

“Do you want them to treat you with disrespect?”

“No!”

Eventually the grower relented and restored the old wages.

Bolstered by a newfound sense of power, the group has evolved and grown by moving from one dramatic event to the next, each illustrating either the workers’ vulnerability or their power to fight back--or both. When a tomato picker was beaten on the job after asking for a drink of water, Benitez displayed the victim’s bloodied shirt to television crews.

Coalition members also helped expose a pair of “slavery” rings in which 20 immigrant workers were held in a form of debt bondage by labor contractors. (The ringleaders were prosecuted and jailed.) Six coalition members staged a monthlong hunger strike in 1997, prompting Carter’s intervention and a modest 5-cent-per-bucket increase.

But attempts to force the growers to grant additional pay raises--the coalition says 75 cents per bucket would be fair--have proved mostly fruitless. The most recent work stoppage, in December, lasted a week but had little effect. Farm workers here have substantially fewer legal rights than those in California and generally have much lower wages.

Benitez said transforming their organization into a legally recognized union is not on the coalition’s short-term agenda. The coalition merely wants a dialogue with the growers.

“The only person we talk to all day is the crew leader. We never see the ranchero,” Benitez said. “We never have direct contact with him. We want to know how the industry is doing, if they have the money to pay us. But they’ve done everything possible to avoid us.”

Hoping to place greater pressure on the growers, about 80 coalition members staged a two-week march this month from South Florida to Orlando. They held rallies across the state, dragging along a 10-foot tall Statue of Liberty carrying a tomato bucket. But when the marchers reached the offices of the growers association, they were greeted by secretaries who politely asked them to wait outside and then locked the doors.

On March 17, they showed up in Gov. Bush’s office in Tallahassee and presented him with 5,000 signatures on a petition calling on him to help start a dialogue between pickers and growers.

Now Benitez and the coalition are planning to up the ante by pressuring Irvine-based Taco Bell Corp. and other corporations that buy a large share of Immokalee tomatoes to use their influence to bring the growers to the table. “We believe that we, too, are partners in this industry. . . . “ Benitez wrote Taco Bell.

Association spokesman Gilmer acknowledges that the wages paid to tomato pickers have remained essentially frozen since about 1980. But he said most farm workers earn more money today because advances in farming have increased the number of tomatoes on each plant, thus increasing the number of tomatoes a worker can pick in a given day.

“If the terms of employment were indeed unfair they wouldn’t keep coming every season to Immokalee to keep picking tomatoes,” he said.

Each season does, in fact, see the arrival of hundreds of new faces in Immokalee. They rent trailers for as much as $200 per week.

Several men from Guatemala were crowded into one two-room trailer near the center of town one day this month when Benitez stopped by to visit. All the men were from the highlands of northwestern Guatemala and their Spanish had the lilting accent peculiar to that region, where most are native speakers of Mayan languages.

A single decoration brightened the dreary space: a yellow coalition flier taped to the wall, with a crudely drawn Statue of Liberty, calling on workers to join “La Gran Marcha del Orgullo”--The Great March for Pride.

“How many are living here?” Benitez asked.

“There’s only 10 of us,” answered Mario Gomez, 25.

“Only 10,” Benitez said with a sad smile.